Sweeney Todd AKA Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is the most performed Stephen Sondheim musical after West Side Story for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein’s music.

The 2007 DreamWorks film of Sweeny Todd, originally released by Warner Bros., has been newly upgraded to 4KUHD by Paramount, its current owner.

The legend of the fictitious serial killer dates to the 17th Century. The character first appeared in print in an 1846 penny dreadful novel called The String of Pearls. It was first performed on stage in 1847 and has had three additional London stage versions since then.

Three British films were made of the second version in 1928, 1930, and 1936.

The fourth version, which Sondheim saw in 1970 on his visit to London for the Angela Lansbury revival of Gypsy, is the one that he and Hugh Wheeler adapted for Sondheim’s 1979 Broadway musical with Lansbury and Len Cariou.

This version adds a backstory which earlier versions didn’t, giving motivation for the murderous barber’s acts. In the expanded story, the barber had been falsely accused of a crime he didn’t commit due to the machinations of the judge who wanted the barber’s wife and daughter for himself.

The film begins with the barber’s 1840s return to London by ship where he rents the shop he once had under a new name (Sweeney Todd) with the intention of seeking revenge on those who wronged him. There are two major subplots, one involving the romance of a young sailor and the barber’s now grown daughter, the other involving a young orphan who helps Todd’s landlady in the restaurant where she serves meat pies made from the remains of Todd’s victims.

The score contains a lot of witty songs from The Worst Pies in London to A Little Priest but it also contains two lovely ballads, Johanna, sung by the sailor, and the haunting “Not While I’m Around,” sung by the landlady and the orphan which provides the impetus for the work’s chilling ending.
The film is directed by Tim Burton (Beetlejuice, Batman) and stars his frequent collaborator, Johnny Depp (Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood) and Burton’s then-life partner, Helena Bonham Carter (The Wings of the Dove, The King’s Speech).

Nominated for three Oscars for Best Actor (Depp), Art Direction (which it won), and Costume Design, this was Depp’s third Oscar nomination, none of which I agreed with.

It’s not that Depp is a bad actor. He can be quite good as he was in his late 1980s TV series, 21 Jump Street, and in such films as What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Ed Wood, but I found his three Oscar-nominated performances to be lacking.

I couldn’t take more than a couple minutes of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. I thought his portrayal of Peter Pan author James Barrie was bland, and his Sweeney Todd okay at best.

Bonham Carter is an actress of terrific range in everything from Howards End and Margaret’s Museum to TV’s The Crown, but here she is underwhelming in a role that should be the qual of that of the actor playing Todd but isn’t.

Newcomers Jamie Campbell Bower as the sailor, Jane Wisener as Todd’s daughter, and Ed Sanders as the orphan have sadly not had the kind of careers their early promise in the film might have foretold.

The accompanying standard Blu-ray features tons of extras including interviews with Sondheim, Burton, and Depp.

Other film versions of Sondheim’s works are surprisingly sparse. They include just eight films: the 1961 Oscar winner, West Side Story; the under-appreciated 1962 film version of Gypsy for which Sondheim supplied the lyrics to Jule Styne’s music; the 1966 film version of his first solo effort, A Funny Thing on the Way to the Forum; a shockingly bad 1977 film of his glorious stage production of A Little Night Music; 2011’s highly popular film version of Into the Woods; and the same year’s barely released version of Company; the barely released 2013 version of Merrily We Roll Along; and the 2021 remake of West Side Story, released two weeks after his death.

A 20-year-long filming of Merrily, We Roll Along is currently in production with Paul Mescal, Ben Platt, and Beanie Feldstein. In the story, the actors age backwards, but for the film they will age forward so that when it is finally completed, it will all make sense.

A long overdue film version of Sondheim’s Follies has been in pre-production since 2019.

Also available are various TV productions of the composer’s works. These include 1966’s Evening Primrose written directly for television; 1970’s Original Cast Album: Company; 1976’s Pacific Overtures; 1982’s Sweeney Todd; 1987’s Into the Woods; both 1988’s and 1991’s Candide for which he supplied some of the lyrics to Bernstein’s music; 1993’s Gypsy; 1996’s Passion; 2015’s Gypsy.

For the movies, Sondheim wrote the score for 1974’s Stavisky and the songs, “I Never Do Anything Twice” for 1976’sThe Seven-Per-Cent Solution and “Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)” for 1990’s Dick Tracy, winning an Oscar for the latter.

He was also a writer. The godson of Oscar Hammerstein II, he wrote eleven episodes of the TV show, Topper, in its first season from 1953-1954. In 1973, he and actor Anthony Perkins wrote the screenplay for the film, The Last of Sheila.

He was on screen in 2003’s Camp and again posthumously in 2002’s Glass Onion. His voice could also be heard in 2021’s tick…tick…BOOM!

Happy viewing.